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Causes: Volcanoes

Ambrym Island, Vanuatu image: Sonny Whitelaw

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Volcanoes

Summary

  • Volcanoes are a natural climate forcing. Over the last few hundred years, erupting volcanoes have caused global temperatures to drop slightly for short periods (Fig 1.).This is because they erupted sulphur dioxide (SO₂), which reflects sunlight, cooling the atmosphere for up to 7 years.
  • Volcanoes also release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. But in the last 200 years, they produced less than 2% compared to the amounts emitted from human activities. The evidence for this is the isotopic signature of CO2 from volcanoes, which differs from the CO2 isotope that comes from burning fossil fuels (Video 1).
  • At the end of the last glacial, melting glaciers may have triggered volcanic episodes (through isostatic rebound) that removed oxygen in the northeastern Pacific Ocean, explaining ‘dead zones’ that lasted millennia.
  • The eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in 2022 damaged the ozone layer and sent huge quantities of water into the atmosphere. The net overall effect was a short-term cooling of the atmosphere, not warming.
  • Ancient mega-volcanoes and flood basalts, including the biggest ever volcanic outpouring in the history of the planet right under New Zealand, caused catastrophic climate changes implicated in all five of Earth’s mass extinction events.
  • Volcanoes have also been implicated in short-lived climate change events, including the so-called Little Ice Age in Europe.
Fig. 1: The impact of volcanoes on climate from1880 to 2005. The grey line shows rise in global temperatures during that period. Compare it with the orange line (volcanoes) and it's clear that while the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions during this period temporarily offset some of the warming, it wasn't enough to offset the rise in temperatures (Image: composite of graphs from Carbon Brief).
Fig. 1: The impact of volcanoes on climate from1880 to 2005. The grey line shows rise in global temperatures during that period. Compare it with the orange line (volcanoes) and it’s clear that while the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions during this period temporarily offset some of the warming, it wasn’t enough to offset the rise in temperatures (Image: composite of graphs from Carbon Brief).

  Causes

Other sections

Home > Climate wiki > What causes climate change? > Volcanoes

Summary

  • Volcanoes are a natural climate forcing. Over the last few hundred years, erupting volcanoes have caused global temperatures to drop slightly for short periods (Fig 1.).This is because they erupted sulphur dioxide (SO₂), which reflects sunlight, cooling the atmosphere for up to 7 years.
  • Volcanoes also release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. But in the last 200 years, they produced less than 2% compared to the amounts emitted from human activities. The evidence for this is the isotopic signature of CO2 from volcanoes, which differs from the CO2 isotope that comes from burning fossil fuels (Video 1).
  • At the end of the last glacial, melting glaciers may have triggered volcanic episodes (through isostatic rebound) that removed oxygen in the northeastern Pacific Ocean, explaining ‘dead zones’ that lasted millennia.
  • The eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January 2022 could eat away at ozone layer. It also sent huge quantities of water into the atmosphere. The net overall effect was a short-term cooling of the atmosphere, not warming.
  • Ancient mega-volcanoes and flood basalts including the biggest ever “volcanic outpouring” in the history of the planet right under New Zealand, caused catastrophic climate changes implicated in all five of Earth’s mass extinction events.
  • Volcanoes have also been implicated in short-lived climate change events, including the so-called Little Ice Age in Europe.
Fig. 1: The impact of volcanoes on climate from1880 to 2005. The grey line shows rise in global temperatures during that period. Compare it with the orange line (volcanoes) and it's clear that while the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions during this period temporarily offset some of the warming, it wasn't enough to offset the rise in temperatures (Image: composite of graphs from Carbon Brief).
Fig. 1: The impact of volcanoes on climate from1880 to 2005. The grey line shows rise in global temperatures during that period. Compare it with the orange line (volcanoes) and it’s clear that while the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions during this period temporarily offset some of the warming, it wasn’t enough to offset the rise in temperatures (Image: composite of graphs from Carbon Brief).

But don’t volcanoes also release CO2?

Volcanoes make CO2 by melting rocks underground, not by burning fossil fuels (combustion), which requires oxygen. Because carbon comes in three forms (isotopes): 12C, 13C, and 14C, and the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere are decreasing (Fig. 2), the chemical and isotopic signature in the atmosphere unequivocally points to humans, not volcanoes adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (Video 1).

Fig. 2: The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is declining.
Fig. 2: The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is declining.

Video 1: Professor Richard Alley explains how the isotopic signature of CO2 plus declining atmosphere O2 clearly points to humans burning fossil fuels.

Volcanic activity has been a significant climate forcing in the past

Some (but certainly not all) key volcanic eruptions that changed or helped change the climate:

  • When Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, volcanoes erupted greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide. Along with other gases (but no oxygen yet) this created an atmosphere, which stopped Earth from completely freezing over.
  •  2.4 billion years ago ‘Snowball Earth’ events—when ice covered most if not all of the planet some—ended when volcanoes erupted, increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere (Video 2).

Video 2: How volcanoes took Earth from a ‘Snowball’ state into a warm state.

  • The ‘Great Dying’: the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Around 252 million years ago, a flood basalt eruption the size of Europe spewed lava over a vast area of Siberia in several waves for some 350,000 years (Video 3). Vast areas of carbon-rich rocks were melted and carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, resulting in rapid and catastrophic global warming, plus the loss of the ozone layer that led to intense DNA-stripping UV radiation. The video explains how flood basalt eruptions have led to several mass extinction events over hundreds of millions of years, and the role played by methane clathrates.
  • 201.3 million years ago, a similar flood basalt eruption over ~11 million km2 at the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province in North America, is implicated in the Triassic-Jurastic Extinction Event.

Video 3: The role of flood basalt eruptions in climate change

  • Around 120 million years ago, volcanic rock found beneath New Zealand’s North Island, and beneath the ocean floor near American Samoa, Tokelau and the Solomon Islands, were once joined together and may have originated from an outpouring of volcanic rock covering some 2000km across.(Video 3 @13 mins).
  • Some 66 million years ago, India was an island heading north towards Eurasia. As it travelled over a hotspot in the planet’s crust, a 20,000-year-long eruption of flood basalt and sulphur dioxide—a gas that reflects sunlight—in an area called the Deccan Traps, cooled the planet around 2°C. The first eruptions happened shortly before the comet that struck Earth and may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs: the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event. The comet may also have triggered more long term eruptions (Video 4) both from the Deccan Traps and also along the edges of plate boundaries under the ocean.

Video 4: The comet blamed for killing the dinosaurs may have triggered more flood basalt eruptions that could have contributed to their extinction.

  • Ten million years later, some 55 million years ago, the boundary between the North American and European tectonic plates opened, leading to large scale eruptions that lasted over 20,0000 years. When tectonic plates separate, lava and gasses erupted from chasms hundreds of kilometres long, melting carbon-rich rocks, something that still happens in Iceland today (Fig. 3). So much CO2 entered the atmosphere that global temperatures rose some 6°C within 20,000 years—geologically a very short time.
  • This period, the Palaeocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), was the largest mass extinction event in the ocean in the past 93 million years—worse than the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Fig. 3: Iceland; Image: Reykjavik Helicopters
Fig. 3: Iceland; Image: Reykjavik Helicopters
  • Seventy-five thousand years ago the super-volcano Toba in Indonesia erupted. Earth was already in the current Ice Age. The eruption caused a ‘volcanic winter’ that lasted 6-10 years, followed by 1,000 years of colder weather and more intense glaciation (Video 5).
  • A series of volcanic eruptions from the 11th to 19th centuries were thought to have contributed to but not solely responsible for the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’. These volcanoes include:

Video 5: The eruption of Toba led to intense glaciation.

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